Abigail (37 page)

She often thought of all the marvellous times she had spent with César and Celia. The walks in the strange and beautiful landscapes of the Campana, before the season of the mosquitoes…the happy, silent hours side by side at their easels…the walks home from the cafés, arm in arm, making the streets and squares ring with their song and laughter…the discussions about life and love and art that had seemed so profound and wise…

Where was it all now? And Annie, who never answered letters? And Pepe, and all her London friends? All the grand forevers of her life—they each served their season and then she passed beyond them. Her need for them lingered awhile; then even it withered.

In her new aloneness she tried to feel lonely, and could not. No need arose within her that was not already filled. Friendship? Rome was a warren of her friends. Work? Her painting was now everything; she knew she would never be more than a footnote in the histories of art, a parenthesis in a
Life
of César Rodet, but she did not paint for such a fame. In any case she had a fame of her own—she rarely went to the theatre or opera without seeing, at the corner of her eye, someone or other pointing her out to friends. Love? Annie had said the final word on that. And sex? If César were still there, she would want it; but she was not a man.

Yet though she could identify no actual want, she knew that something was missing. Her baby? The chance of ever having babies? Unless she had found the trick of being massively dishonest with herself, it was neither of those. It was something much less tangible. Then one day, quite out of the blue and for no reason at all, she remembered a little incident from her girlhood. It was the moment she dipped her pen in its inkwell and started to write what became the Abbot’s first article. She could not, after so many hundreds of thousands of words, remember what it had been about. But what she did remember was that absolute sense of certainty in the act of carrying pen to paper, a heightened awareness that what was about to happen was
right.

And that, she realized, was the note now missing from her life. It was not dull, indeed it was exciting; nor was it profitless, nor worthless, nor stale. Yet it lacked that particular
buzz:
the certainty that what was coming next was right.

Perhaps it was the sort of signal she needed only in her youth. Certainly she could go on working and enjoying life to the full without it now.

***

In 1887 they pulled down the ghetto and turned it into a spacious square. The Jews, who had been freed from restriction at the end of papal rule, had long gone—the rich to villas amid the rich, the poor to try their luck a little apart from their history. But their tradition of cleanliness and order, despite the teeming anthill and dark labyrinthine alleys in which they had lived, remained. The ghetto had always been a friendly place, and she had often gone a little out of her way to walk through it. Now, though from the atelier she had been able to see no more than a slice of one corner of it, she missed its dark warmth intensely.

They even began to clear the rubble from the streets and excavate them down to the original level, exposing the half-buried ground floor of the Teatro. Soon, perhaps, they would close the fish mart and the whole area would become respectable. She considered moving to Venice.

It was easiest to think of such a move when she was alone in the atelier. But when she was in one of the cafés amid all her friends, arguing as if for her life about the new colour theories of Georges Seurat or the way Degas was handling pastel, then she could not even consider crossing the Tiber.

So she came to tolerate the prettification of the Vecchio, and Venice dwindled to a distant possibility.

One evening a man joined their café group with a simple, “You permit?” There was something about him that brooked no refusal. Certainly no one refused.

He had the air of an artist—perhaps a sculptor, Abigail thought. He greeted no one as he sat down, but he nodded stiffly at her as if they might once have met. He looked at least sixty, though his fair, wavy hair had only just begun to recede. His eyes were blue and challenging; even later, when she realized that one of them was glass, they did not lose their challenge. His skin was dried and wrinkled, like a peasant’s; a scar ran from the corner of his left eye—the eye that proved to be glass—to his ear. The wrinkles of age crisscrossed it like a child’s scribble. His mouth was set as grim as a turtle’s, even when he smiled. His hands were rough; it was the sight of them that had made Abigail think he might be a sculptor.

If someone had whispered to her, “That man used to get drunk every evening of his youth…that man has cuckolded more husbands than Casanova…that man has seen the inside of every jail in Italy…that man used to swallow nails and fire in a circus,” or any one of a dozen similar one-line biographies, she would have believed each and all of them. He looked the sort of man who might have done anything, and despite his years, he looked stocky and powerful enough—and ruthless enough—to do it all still.

Though he followed everything that was said, he contributed nothing. He drank his wine with a mechanical efficiency—up, tilt, sip, tilt, down. And never once looked at the glass. Again and again his eyes turned to her. He made her flesh crawl. She hoped he was just passing through Rome and was not set to become an habitué of their favourite cafés.

Usually their group broke up in twos and threes and drifted home, but that night someone came in and said there was a big thunderstorm descending from the Alban Hills and already it was impossible to get a cab. Everyone stood to hurry home. Massimo Ronzi walked most of the way with her; she was glad to see the glass-eyed stranger walk off up the Corso, in the opposite direction.

“I hope he doesn’t come again,” she said. “Who was he?”

“I never saw him before,” Massimo said.

These walks home had now turned into baroque rituals of seduction and refusal; sometimes he told her of past conquests; sometimes he would court her with flowery salacity. This was such a night. He was a conquered land…he lay at her feet, trembling to know her will for she was his conqueror…he was hers to command…let her become his general and he would furnish her an army—all the
privates
she could ever want! She would see how they could
stand
and
drill
! And so on.

“One day, Massimo,” she said as they parted, “you’ll die of a heart attack: I will say yes to you.”

“Ah—if I might lie in the country of my choice, my heart would heal at once!”

He was never short of a reply. Yet it often struck her that he might, in fact, be a virgin still. It would almost be worth yielding herself to find out. With a smile she watched him go away along the Via del Portico. Then the sharp squall of wind that heralds rain swept through the streets and made her scurry for home.

A voice from behind called out her name.

She turned. It was the glass-eyed man, hurrying toward her. “I know your uncle,” he said. He spoke Italian with a French accent.

“I have no uncle, signor. Signor…?”

“Your Uncle Daniel. Dan Telling? Your mother’s brother.”

It stirred the faintest of memories. Her mother had only once mentioned such a brother. When Abigail was a girl of about fourteen, Nora had taken them all, her brothers and sisters, to see the hovel near Manchester where she herself had grown up. She had talked of a brother then—she and her brother used to sit under their father’s loom and “tie the rinks,” or something. She had never mentioned his name; there was some disgrace attached to him.

“He’s dying,” the man said. “If he finds no safe shelter, he’ll be dead before the week is out.”

The first large warm raindrops fell around them. Lightning turned the man’s scar into a canyon.

“We can’t stand out here talking,” she said. “Let’s at least get under the arches over there.”

They ran to the Teatro, ducking as if the rain were a fusillade of shot.

“My uncle, you say?” she asked as soon as they were under an arch. The rain now fell in stair rods. The splatters on the street, when frozen by the lightning, were like an army of miniature silver knights on chargers, each with a glistening lance.

They had to shout above the rain and between the bursts of thunder.

“Your Uncle Dan. Two years older than your mother.”

“Is he a criminal?”

The man laughed. “If it’s criminal to want a better world, yes! He’s a criminal.”

“You mean the police are after him?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want of me?”

“Shelter him. Until he recovers.”

“From what? Is he wounded?”

“He has malaria. We tried to hide in the Campana. He’s an old man now. Harmless. But they’d still set him to hard labour.”

She paced up and down beneath the arch, wishing she could simply walk away from him; but he would never let her go, not until he had an answer.

“I can’t shelter him,” she said at last. “He’s chosen a life of risk. Why should he—or you—now try to cast it on me?”

“He is your kin.”

“All of a sudden! No. I will not have him. Anyway, you can’t bring him through the streets in this storm.”

“He is there already.”

“What d’you mean?”

“He’s in your rooms. I waited until you went out and…”

She listened no further but turned to the inner portal that gave access, eventually, to her stair. He, with an agility that belied both his age and his build, overtook her.

“We’ll leave,” he said, hand on her door. “As soon as the storm is over, we’ll go. I promise.”

A woman opened the door from within. She saw Abigail and covered her face. The shawl muffled her laugh. “It was all wasted,” she said. “He’s dead.” The laugh was not hysteria; the death meant nothing to her.

“God rest his soul,” Abigail said.

“Hah!” The woman snorted and, brushing past them, fled down the stairs.

“What now?” Abigail asked, reluctant to go in. “A priest? The police?”

“I’ll deal with it,” the man said. “May I go in?”

She laughed at his sudden scruple and he, seeing the joke, smiled dourly and went before her.

“Who was that woman?” she asked.

“It wasn’t necessary for me to know her.”

He was indeed dead—already cold. “Yet he burned when I left him!” the man said. One of the dead man’s eyes would not close, but it was too glazed even to hint at life. He was a shrivelled, emaciated sparrow of a man; nothing in his face reminded Abigail of her mother.

“You go on to bed,” the man said. “He’ll be gone by morning. We both will.” He took a set of teeth from his pocket and worked them into the dead man’s mouth. “In case he swallowed them in his fever,” he explained. “That woman wouldn’t have cared.”

As he pried open the jaws she saw that the gums were badly ulcerated.

“The besetting disease of the revolutionary,” the man said. “Bad teeth followed by bad dentures.”

With his teeth restored, Daniel looked younger—at least, he was no longer a wizened, hundred-year-old Punchinello. There was now even a hint of a likeness with Nora and, oddly enough, with Sefton, who had passed briefly through Rome four summers ago. She had never seen a likeness between Sefton and her mother before, but Daniel bridged the gap and showed it to her.

“I’ll make some drawings of him,” she said. “My mother may like to see.”

“And your Uncle Samuel.” He saw her surprise. “Didn’t you know of him? Oh yes, he and Dan corresponded often.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s Mr. Gladstone’s valet. Your father got him that position.”

She laughed in astonishment—that an utter stranger could wander into her life, here in Rome, and reveal her family’s intimate secrets!

She drew Daniel’s death mask from many angles, working on into the small hours. From time to time the man went out into the streets, but always found them too busy for his liking.

Toward three he came back and said, “The river has flooded the Ripetta. Every spare policeman and night idler in Rome has gone there. We won’t get a better chance.”

“Where will you take him?”

“Only as far as the river.”

“No!”

“He expects it. His wife threw herself in the Seine, many years ago. He’ll join her.”

He took Daniel piggyback; in the dark he could be mistaken for a labourer carrying a gentleman through the floods.

“It’s still pouring down,” Abigail said. “At least come back here and dry yourself. And shelter till it stops.”

He was back within twenty minutes, soaked to the skin. She fetched the dressing gown her models used when they rested a pose. While he changed she went out and got a brandy for him.

“Why did his wife throw herself in the Seine?” she asked.

He was shivering, but the brandy burned his circulation back. “She had toothache,” he said. “I’d better sleep here. This rain isn’t going to stop before morning.”

Next day he was shivering. She asked him if he, too, had caught malaria, and what should she get for it? They spoke now in French. He told her it was just a cold, and brandy and milk would cure it. She explained to the woman who did the cleaning that he was a model who had been taken ill. The woman brought up a
scaldino
,
but the man said it was bad for fevers. Whenever he burned he threw the bedcovers down to his waist and asked Abigail to fan him with a towel, like a boxer.

At lunchtime she fed him hot zabaglione with a spoon. His teeth were not bad, she noticed. By four o’clock his forced cooling treatment, and the milk and brandy, seemed to have worked. His nose streamed and his eyes were red, but his fever had gone and his pulse was nearly back to normal. In the evening he accepted a
scaldino.
The evening papers had no reports that a body had been found in the Tiber.

The following morning his cold had thickened and he complained of feeling like wood; but he was obviously over the fever stage. “I’ll go after lunch,” he said.

But she asked him to stay. She wanted to hear all he knew of her Uncle Daniel. Curiously she no longer felt repelled by this man; nursing him had softened her aversion. It was several days before his nose and throat healed enough to allow him to converse. There was still nothing in the newspapers.

He asked her for books. She brought a selection and was astonished to see him choose one of her mother’s favourites, Gérard de Nerval’s
Les Filles du feu.

“I saw them cut poor Gérard down,” he said. “He hanged himself one snowy night from an iron grating outside a brothel in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. He was found by a drunk, walking home with a
grisette.
The drunk said, ‘Thank you,’ believing Gérard had merely stepped aside to let them pass. But the girl said, ‘You fool, can’t you see he’s hanged himself!’ And the man said, ‘He has his hat on. Nobody hangs himself with his hat on.’ Then the girl giggled and said, ‘In times like these, why not?’”

He flipped icily through the pages, reading nothing. “I was there with Arsène Houssaye soon after. Gérard had just finished a translation for the Théâtre Français and Houssaye had paid him, so it wasn’t lack of money. Houssaye tried to arrange a funeral at Notre Dame but the archbishop insisted on a note from the doctor, because it was a suicide. To protect the Church, you see. D’you know what the doctor wrote?”

Abigail shook her head; her eyes did not leave the man’s face.

“He wrote: ‘Your Grace—Gérard de Nerval hanged himself because he saw his madness face to face.’ It was enough. When we buried him in Père-Lachaise there was no oration, but Houssaye turned to me and said, ‘He hanged himself on Friday the twenty-sixth—twice thirteen—in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne at the bottom of the Rue de la Tuerie, near the ravine, and under the symbolic sign of a key. Did he think of all that? How else can we explain this inexplicable thing? This death must have its morality and its profound significance in such symbols.”

“What did he mean?” Abigail asked.

“Houssaye was always saying things like that. But he was director of the Théâtre Français. He could make such wind sound like Socrates. Like you and your friends in the café. You think that truth drifts like gossamer in the wind.”

“How do
you
explain it, then?”

“The doctor’s note was closest. Because it told the truth by opposites. That is how it protected the Church—and the rest of us. ‘He saw his madness face to face’! He saw
our
madness. He saw our whole mad world. He saw all those things you and your friends protect yourselves from seeing behind your ramparts of cleverness. Oh, you are all
very
clever people!”

A fit of coughing interrupted him.

“Rue de la Tuerie,” he said. “You know
tuerie
means slaughterhouse? Yes, of course. He saw the world has been one long slaughterhouse. Every day, all day, from the first day to this day, somewhere, there is pain inflicted. Someone is tortured, degraded, defiled—not for a passing instant, but for a lifetime. By
us.
Gérard could hear their cries; he saw those people face to face. And the time came when he could no longer look
us
in the face.” A distant look came into his eyes. “Daniel could hear them, too—those cries. And he was stronger. You must learn to be proud of him.”

“And you? What do you hear?” She just wanted him to go on talking.

“I hear so many things, so many other things.” His smile mocked himself. He held up the book. “I’ll read this, and its beauty will mask those cries for me.”

“Are the police after you?”

“Not very seriously.”

“Why not?”

“They have a nose, those bastards. They can sniff out the dangerous revolutionary lurking inside the smooth and polished cabinet minister.” Again the self-mocking smile. “And they can sniff out the wet firework even in one who, like me, looks the perfect part. We have an unwritten pact, the police, my revolutionary friends, and me—live and let live.”

“Yet Daniel turned to you? Not to his comrades?”

“His comrades! They take their marching orders from History, not from Humanity. Yes, Daniel turned to me because the flaw in me—the thing that failed me as a revolutionary—was by then the only thing in the world on which he could depend: humanity. Oh, I have listened for the Voice of History! No novice ever prayed for a vocation as I prayed to hear that voice. But all I hear is the babble of humanity.”

“‘Pity has a human face,’” she said in English.

He looked at her with such a puzzled expression that she, thinking he did not understand, began to translate. But he waved her to silence. Then she saw that he was not puzzled but was searching his memory. “Ah!” he said at last, and went on in English:

“‘For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.’”

She clapped her hands and laughed in sheer delight. “You know Blake?” she asked.

“Who could hear humanity’s voice and not hear his!” he said. “And now you must excuse me.
My
voice will be gone in a minute.”

He began to read as if she were not there. She watched him. How could she ever have thought him repulsive! He radiated such understanding and such fellow-feeling. There was a…a
greatness
in him. Yes, it was not too strong a word. He was not great like a great painter, or a great statesman, or a great wit…great anything. He was simply a great man, whatever the world’s opinion of him. She could see it.

“You mustn’t leave here until you are quite well again,” she said.

***

“Will your friends not miss you?” he asked her next day when once again she came and sat at his bedside.

“Friends,” she said. “I’m half ashamed of them now.”

To move his glass eye he had to tilt his head to one side, right or left. It gave him a kindly demeanour, even when he did not intend it. But he intended it now. “Ah, now that’s my fault. I am an old man and I’ve lived too long—almost seventy years—in the shadow of approaching death. And too long in the company of impatient men. Everything I say is too brief and too confident. If that has made you ashamed of your friends, then…”

“Half ashamed,” she corrected.

He beamed at her. “That’s good. It means you were only half listening to me. Which, even so, is more than I deserve.”

“Are you really getting on for seventy?” she asked.

“This,” he tapped his cranium, “thinks so. But this,” he thumped his chest, “doesn’t agree.”

Laughing, she asked him to tell her about Daniel.

He told her everything he knew, from the beginning to the end. The beginning, for Daniel, had been a strike at his mill; he had been the leader. The mill owner had agreed to their demands on condition they permanently disbanded the union. “It was a terrible moment for Daniel, and he never was certain he had made the right decision. It cost him your mother’s love and the lives of his little brother and sister. If he accepted those terms, the owner would see to it that they could never organize again. If he refused, the strike would be long and bitter. Children would starve. Worse still, he would be jailed—leaving your mother, who was only seventeen, to look after three even younger children. Yet he hearkened to the voice of history and refused the mill owner’s conditions. The last night of his freedom was spent with three Chartist gentlemen, planning his defence—all of them knowing it was futile, for he was choosing martyrdom. And all that evening your mother—that hungry, worried little seventeen-year-old—begged him to mend the door of their hovel. She would have to go out to work, you see, and leave the two infants indoors all day, alone.”

“I remember!” Abigail said. “She showed us the place once. She said a boar got in and ate one of the children alive! She has never got over it, I think. She found one of the little boy’s arms up in the rafters. The little girl died of rat bites soon after.”

The man shut his eyes. It was some time before he resumed his tale. “Daniel never mended that door. And she never forgave him. But who was right? Who
is
right? The man who struggles for his family? Or the man who makes the oppressed of all the world his family, and struggles for them?”

“My mother struggled for her family—for us.”

“And she’s now the Countess of Wharfedale and, some say, the richest lady in England. And her brother ends penniless in the Tiber and not a paragraph to mark his passing. The moral seems clear, does it not? But is it? Does your heart find it as clear-cut as that?”

She shook her head vehemently.

He went on to tell her of Daniel’s imprisonment and transportation to Australia—the hopelessness he felt out there, the guilt at the children’s deaths, his sister’s rejection, the utter degradation of convict life, then the hardening of his resolve to fight all oppression and inhumanity, wherever he saw it. Then the pardon—too late, for it merely showed him that the liberal spirit is a weak spirit. The return home—the long road: night school, study, endless endless discussion. And then the turning point—the realization as he travelled through Europe of the sheer
size
of the problem that faced him.

“He often said to me, ‘My brother-in-law’—he meant your father, John Stevenson as he then was—‘my brother-in-law would hate to be told it, but he was the biggest revolutionary teacher in Europe. All those railways he built! Until we could travel around on them we had no idea of the size of the conspiracy ranged against us. But after that, any working man who travelled through industrial England, let alone Europe, and thought he could achieve anything by combining against just one master was insane. It wasn’t Karl Marx who taught me to fight a class war—it was my brother-in-law’s railways!’”

During his life Daniel had been on the wanted list of every police force in Europe. He lived in a poverty more grinding than the poverty he fought to end. He was birched, flogged, jailed at hard labour, sentenced to death, reprieved, and deported more times than he could remember. Where there was a revolution—a crack in the façade that might bring the whole edifice tumbling down—Daniel was there, on the barricades, on the committees, shouting encouragement, drawing up demands, covenants, death lists. He shirked nothing. And
they
never defeated him.

“In the end it was his own class defeated him, the working class. As their lot improved, they grew less interested in the Revolution. Instead they wanted more of the same. He wanted to destroy capitalism; they wanted only to milk it. He saw it as a ravening wolf, to be shot; to them it was a goose whose eggs had recently been laid gold-plated—perhaps they might in time be all gold!” He shook his head and sighed. “It was, you see, a mature form of the argument he had had with your mother so long ago: do we settle now for what we can get, or do we fight on until we get the whole structure of things right? Like a black shadow, that question reached forward half a century and extinguished Daniel’s light.”

He was silent awhile, as if unsure how much she wished to hear.

“Go on,” she said.

“It killed him, years ago. These last years have been like a walking death. He saw the working class settle for the gilded eggs and suddenly he realized how rare in the world are people like himself—those who will sacrifice their comfort, freedom, dignity, family, themselves, everything, for the sake of an ideal. He never expected to see the Revolution in his own lifetime. He
hoped
,
of course, but he was a realist, too. He had travelled the railways! Yet it never even crossed his mind to give up the struggle on that account. Such a man
is
rare, as saints are rare. And suddenly he saw it.

“But worse—oh far, far worse!—he saw what that meant. The Revolution, you see, would
never
be a mass revolt. It would always be the work of a rare minority who would have to impose it by force on the mass of the people. That’s the vision which killed him. When he realized he was, inevitably and necessarily, working to replace the terror and oppression of capitalism with the terror and oppression of idealism, the heart went out of him.

“Then he was a clockwork toy, running down, doing all the old tricks but ever more slowly. In the end he was so slow that even the Italian police could catch him! The rest you know, or can guess, or—like me—is unimportant.”

The tears in her eyes prevented her from seeing him clearly; the lump in her throat made it hard to say, “If I had known, I’d have helped you with him to the Tiber. I would have said a prayer over him.”

“He didn’t go without a prayer,” the man said. “Atheist as I am and as he was, if there is a God, I believe He would rather hear prayers from atheists than hypocrites. ‘If I had only known…’ is the cry of the bourgeoisie whenever its eyes are forcibly opened.”

She put her hands to her face and wept silently into them, ashamed for him to see her. He made no move to comfort or touch her. When she grew calm again, she felt the need to explain to him.